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There were three Mirai no Neiro panels at AX, the first being PVs sent from overseas (translated and presented by us) and the second being discussions by the Vocaloid producers who paid their way to attend. The first panel actually ended up starting quite late and so we managed to re-run it the next day; I wouldn’t really say it was the fault of the con staff, though, and the panel tech crew was very helpful.

Part 1:

0. We started with a hologram concert (AKA rear projection on a mosquito net) run by Amid-P (@AOKI_KC) with a custom video by masatakaP and the songs from:

If you’ve been to Anime Expo in the last two years, you might have seen the Vocaloid panel “The Sound of the Future”, by Masaki. (If not, you should go next year.)

This year kransom and I (plus mdl and stephieku) helped run the panel and did song translations. We still ended up an hour late, since the previous panel had way more corporate sponsorship, but here’s the playlist.

Most of these links are to the unsubtitled versions, since I forgot to ask if we could upload the translations, so contact us or watch this space if you’d like them. But you should watch them anyway!

>>27
People mainly sell posters.
I barely saw any doujin books, but somehow I got a Japanese Touhou doujin. There were some from Taiwan.

I don’t know what the Japanese book was. There was a dealer called Fairy Doujin selling doujin artbooks in Chinese that were good but very expensive. Hen Da Ne did not come to Fanime, so there was no Comiket content to be found.

32: Anonymous 2011/05/31(火) 13:13:01.97 ID:9cXwo77C0

There’s a lot of guys like Saizensen-kun in America too.

Saizensen-kun is the name of a famous sweaty photographer who was the subject of an old Internet meme.

47: Anonymous 2011/05/31(火) 13:17:22.65 ID:9cXwo77C0

The doujin area

Some little girls

I must have missed him.

57: Anonymous 2011/05/31(火) 13:19:13.38 ID:S9I+C3lZ0

>>47
The familiar sight of backpacks…
Wait, isn’t this just Japan!?

55: Anonymous 2011/05/31(火) 13:18:38.78 ID:viUDrtXA0

I laughed at the Vocaloid cosplay.
What are the popular manga and anime in America right now? I was under the impression they’d stopped showing Naruto and Dragonball.

58: Anonymous 2011/05/31(火) 13:19:44.69 ID:9cXwo77C0

>>57
It’s the same as you guys. They all like Madoka Magica and stuff.

62: Anonymous 2011/05/31(火) 13:20:41.95 ID:9cXwo77C0

By the way, all the Asians I saw seemed to be Chinese.

78: Anonymous 2011/05/31(火) 13:24:47.31 ID:mJZBDakd0

Does doujin art over there use American comics style?

84: Anonymous 2011/05/31(火) 13:28:46.40 ID:9cXwo77C0

>>76
There was one with American-style Touhou.
But they weren’t selling doujin books, but posters for $15. And pins.

Has fujoshi culture made it over there?
Does Amazon list BL as a category over there?

The manga category on amazon.jp is actually named “Manga / Anime / BL”.

185 Anonymous 2011/05/31(火) 14:23:31.92 ID:9cXwo77C0

These are all the doujin I found…

The one on top is by kata. I think the rest are Chinese. I’m impressed he found that many.

Suddenly got bored translating. The highlights:
– Americans only do posters for art.
– Americans are really good at making costumes.
– American cameras are silent so it’s easier to take stealth photos.
– You can take pictures anywhere in America, but it’s forbidden in most parts of Japanese events.

As for myself I’ve never bought an artist print, because I have no idea what to do with it… they should really do more books. That and many artists just aren’t that good.

As for Fanime, it was much better than Acen, but almost as programming-free. They had so many late panel changes that the schedule wasn’t printed until the second day, and Anime Hell disappeared this year. I spent most of it playing Twinkle Star Sprites and meeting Touhous.

The location and nearby food are really good, so convention recommended anyway.

Convention was mostly eventless; there were an incredible number of boring panels on the schedule. Almost every time we tried to enter a panel room, it was full, because they’d put all the popular panels inside tiny hotel meeting rooms, and put all the unpopular panels inside the main events rooms1. Besides that, nearly all the convention seems to occur in the dealer’s room, so we walked around that for most of the weekend.

The FLOW concert (they did that one Eureka Seven OP) was delayed. Instead they put on SWEK, aka two old white guys on guitar and drums who seemed to be escapees from an 80s metal band and a woman wearing a nerd-joke shirt whose singing was even worse than the people at con karaoke. They butchered some assorted 2000s anisongs for an hour. I’m not sure the instrumentalists had ever heard the songs before. Was the “no cameras” rule meant to hide their copyright violation? Are they con staff? Who will solve this mystery?

Ex-internet forum moderator “Menacer” won a prize by completing the sentence “Where the hell is Jack…”. The prize was the Mecha Masters box set including the soundtrack to M.D. Geist II.

I mistook a Pokémon cosplayer for a Cyborg 009 cosplayer, which I found out when she complained that everyone she’d met that day had asked her if she was a Cyborg 009 cosplayer, and what was a Cyborg 009 anyway? I told her but I’m sure she forgot.

We went into a Vocaloid panel (there were two, for no reason, but of course one of them was full) where they spent the first half explaining “what is Vocaloid,” and then asked the audience “how did you get into Vocaloid”? If they can answer that, they didn’t need the explanation, right!?

Update: I happened to check the guest list for Fanime, the next weekend, and noticed both the X Japan guy and FLOW are also attending there, where you probably won’t have to hear any local con bands first.

One was a webcomic author retelling the plot to his comic, frame by frame, to an room about 1/10 full. [↩]

I decided at the last minute to go to Anime Boston after I realized I’d scheduled myself out of Otakon. Not having been there before, I had no idea if it was any good, but had heard positive things about it… probably from seeing Anime Hell on the schedule.

It actually turned out to be a little uneventful. Not as much as MomoCon, of course, since there were ~17,000 people, but I never really met anyone – all the attendees seemed to spend their time sitting in the hallways and not going to the same panels as me. The con organizers had decided that their con theme was “mad science”, which is something that doesn’t really exist in anime and is kind of hard to work with (AWA has since ditched con themes for similar reasons). Anime World Order, who were doing all the featured panels, gave it their best by playing important scientific anime Baoh and some villainous plots from Sailor Moon, but it didn’t quite work.

Some things which did actually happen:

I got there just in time to see the end of wah’s Shinbo panel, which consisted of him playing five different clips of Bakemonogatari and reading random translated jokes from his Uncyclopedia article, which nobody understood. It sounded pretty unfocused and his presentation skills aren’t really up there, but I guess that’s what you’d expect from a first-time panel. We stayed in his apartment for the weekend, and it was truly an otaku_room.

I went to one of Alex Leavitt‘s eight million panels, this one about pilgrimages to the sites of your favorite anime background paintings. He spent the first half talking about his attempt at the actual Shikoku pilgrimage, to the point where I thought he was just going to talk about that the entire time, but came back at the end and we all found out where the the anime pilgrimage wiki was.
(I just remembered that I went to see Emma’s house in London in 2006, but it’s a bit too late to write that one up now.)

Vertical’s Ed Chavez had a discussion people where he asked various Internet manga-knowing-about people questions about the state of manga and the industry. In keeping with the philosophy of this blog, he didn’t introduce any of them and you were just expected to know who all of them were. One of them was kransom, contributing his knowledge of “having actually been to Comic Market” and his skill at beating down evil. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten most of the panel content, but you can hear it all here!

We went into the Touhou panel long enough to take this picture and leave. Nobody seems to know what the audience for those things is supposed to be – this one started off by explaining that Touhou is a shooting game “like DoDonPachi”, which would just confuse anyone who didn’t know what it was, and then they just started playing one of the slower stages from PCB, which would just bore everyone else. They could just talk about pixiv memes the entire time, that’d be pretty good.

I tried to play Sonic 3 but got stuck in a pit. The game room, despite being in a huge badly lit garage-style room, is somehow still not as depressing as Otakon’s. I guess that’s something!

First, I went to MomoCon, a free convention at Georgia Tech where nothing happened. Luckily, attending it involved walking about five minutes, so that wasn’t much of a loss. (although I did buy a shirt for some guy who hasn’t paid me back yet, oops)

They’re apparently getting a bit too popular, so this year they developed a (pretty much meaningless) attendance cap. This was implemented by having four different lines in two buildings all labeled “registration” so you had no idea where to go. Other changes included the room with some guy’s doujin game PC on a projector being replaced with a room where three guys played the Miku PSP game over TV link on a projector, and also the room where they played Photon Space Sailer [sic] Starlight Odin being replaced with this:

Now, the only episode I saw of Element Hunters was pretty dangerous, but that could use some work.
At least the future is in safe hands(?):

Some other dumb pictures here. I’ll try to write up Anime Boston before I forget it…

Update: I forgot I found a copy of eternal fighter zero for $5. I’ll probably never play it, I’d have to finish Melty Blood story mode first and that’ll never happen.

After some twitter back-and-forths, I’ve decided to try to do a few posts where I introduce some of the stuff I picked up last Comic Market (C77), mostly just to prove to people that you can spend over $500 on interesting doujinshi and have basically none of it be pornographic. (Nozomu Tamaki pushed his ero book on me and who am I to deny that man a sale?)

Of course, to start off this series of posts, I’m going to basically mess up my entire theme by starting with a professionally published book from 2007. I did, however, purchase this book at C77, and it’s the closest one to my laptop, so I’m going to start with the first volume of Manga Ronso Boppatsu (マンガ論争勃発, “Manga Debate Eruption”, alternatively “The Manga Criticism War Erupts!”), authored and edited by Kaoru Nagayama, author of Eromanga Studies (East Press), and the journalist Takashi Hiruma.

Manga Ronso Boppatsu is a collection of nearly fifty short (2-6 page) articles on a variety of topics, most of which center around a single expert or critic’s thoughts on the topic at hand. The authors of the book state that the idea behind the book is to listen to various positions on each of these hot topics, such as the globalization of manga, creators’ rights, and the limiting of free expression in manga, so that constructive discussion can start taking place rather than the mindless, polarized shouting matches that’re all too easy to fall into when debating these issues.

I ended up getting this book (and its sequel) thanks to a tip from Vertical’s Ed Chavez, who sent me off in the direction of the far-left corner of the Big Sight’s East-3 hall, where I found a rather large table staffed by just one guy, who I assume was one of the authors of the book. The placement of their booth was a bit odd to me, as it was down in one of the doujinshi-selling halls (as opposed to the upstairs industry hall), but up against the wall where non-doujinshi products like markers and corn dogs are sold.

This was actually a rather appropriate place to stick these guys, as while their book is released by a professional publisher (Micro Magazine), the subjects covered in the volume either deal directly with doujinshi events like Comiket, or are extremely relevant to the ideals embodied by these events themselves: Spreading manga culture and providing a space where individuals can distribute works of free expression. I’m not just making this stuff up, either–the Comic Market Preparation Committee and the National Doujinshi Event Liaison Group are both prominently given credit for cooperation right next to the authors.

I mentioned that Manga Ronso Boppatsu is the closest book to my laptop, and there’s actually a reason for that; it’s basically the only thing I’ve been turning to as of late when I feel like educating myself on manga. While I’m still working through it, the articles I’ve read so far are all very informative and provide thoughtful views on whatever topic is at hand. Of course, there is a trade-off to gathering the breadth of experts that the book jams into a little over 200 pages, and that is that a relative lack of depth in any given article. However, the articles are all excellent primers on their respective topics given by some of the most respected individuals in their fields. Since it’d be nearly impossible to give my thoughts on each individual article, I’m simply going to spend the rest of this post below the cut translating each article’s title and the primary individual consulted or interviewed (when applicable), and strongly suggest the volume (available for purchase at Amazon and bk1.jp, among other places) to anyone with an interest in a mix of solid journalism and on-the-ground, current commentary on the state of manga and doujinshi.